There's a lot of problems I had with this course so I will list what was good first and break

up the
problems as much as possible.

What was good:

-The SolidWorks tutorials, for the most part, were quite good and really helped with the assignments.

-Lectures were interesting and Nobes was always well prepared, usually with a neat video on screen
relating to engineering at the start of class

-Overall, I think Nobes is a good instructor and I would take another class with him if given the chance

-Inspired me to learn more CAD programs along side SolidWorks

-Lecture notes are very helpful and detailed

-TA's in the Tuesday lab in 3-28 (Steven Middleton and Rezvan Rafiee Alavi) are incredibly helpful and
knowledgeable about the subject

-No paper final for a software based class. The written midterm and final is what I hated most about
ENCMP 100

Issues with the course:

I'll talk about the labs first.

First things first, the "go-nogo" marking scheme is really just stupid for a class like this. I debated
answering this entire form with "Strongly Disagree" and saying that it was due to go-nogo criteria just to
drive the point home, but I'll refrain from doing that. I never got hit with the automatic zero personally,
but the idea that you are even able to lose 8% or more off your final grade for the course for making the
mistake of forgetting something in the title block (which SolidWorks will sometimes just fail to populate
properly anyways, i.e. the material for an assembly being reported as a number rather than 'Various' if it
is composed of more than one material) or a set of assembly balloons on a second assembly sheet is
absolutely INSANE. I understand the point about wanting to enforce the idea that the industry has
certain standards that must be adhered to, but it's really unnecessary and over the top to deduct 100%
of the mark for this. Instead of creating a learning opportunity, that just makes people stress out about
small stuff like naming the god damn file right rather than learning anything. I've actually had to email
the TA's and waste their time asking about the file name of all things because I'm trying to avoid the
stupid zero. If you want to make percent deductions for these mistakes, that's fine, I can agree with that
to an extent, but getting a 0 for these mistakes is asinine. Please do not do this next time you teach the
course.

Secondly, the marking from the TA's is inconsistent. I'm assuming there is a standard marking rubric for
each assignment but some graders seem to mark harsher or easier than others which is a problem for a
curved class. For example, for one of the assignments my study group and I were doing the assignment
at the same time, so naturally we helped each other out with the drawing and modeling. By the end of
it, another member of the group and myself bad pretty much the exact same drawing with very few
changes, yet he received 4 more marks on the assignment than I did and didn't get marked wrong on
things that I did even though we turned in almost the exact same assignment. Jenny Li is the TA that
marks mine, and I'm fine with being marked hard because it helps you learn, but the other TA's should
be grading the same way to at least make it fair for everyone. More feedback is needed for the marking
though, just circling something in red with no explanation doesn't help anyone and I'll just be wasting
more of both the TA's and my time emailing in and asking why I got this wrong. Also, why do the TA's for
the lab room and section you actually attend not actually mark your assignment? I put Steven and
Rezvan's initials on the first 5 or 6 assignments and every time it was circled in red in the feedback file
and I had no idea why, until they finally wrote to just use the "SL" initials. So, to get any feedback for my
assignment I have to either do that by email or make an appointment to drop by their office rather than
just ask in the 10 minutes before the next lab period. Waste of time.

Moving on to the instructor and lecture:

The assignment files are often extremely vague and hard to interpret. A lot of the times the assignment
notes make no sense in the context they are written in and Nobes has to send multiple follow up emails
to the whole class explaining something on the assignment, all because it wasn't clarified properly the
first time. More care and consideration needs to be put into writing the assignment instructions for each
week.

There are a lot of concepts covered in the assignments that aren't covered in either the lecture or the
tutorials (I assume this is why the tutorials are being updated this summer). For example, miter flanges.
We were told in the lab to "just google it" which is fine, as engineering students we have to look up a lot
of stuff on our own which isn't a problem, but I'm not sure it's fair for that to be an expectation of the
course. If it's going to be on an assessment, it should be covered in lecture or at least the tutorial for
that week. Keyway tolerancing and the GD&T dimensioning was also not covered very well and it
showed up on the assignments a lot.

Last thing, it's a minor detail but it's a point of feedback, Nobes really needs to proofread his emails.
There's an embarrassing number of typos and misspellings in almost every email interaction he has with
students and it's quite unbecoming of a professional engineer.